My Life Story, Part 3: What I Only Understood About Happiness After Financial Freedom

From “I must be rich” to finally understanding happiness

In the first two parts, I shared the first half of my life in full.

From a poor childhood in Qishan and Meinong, Kaohsiung, and growing up in a single-parent home,

to starting adult life a million in debt and gradually building a net worth of over NT$10 million.

If you haven't read them yet, I'd suggest catching up first:

• My Life Story, Part 1: How a Single-Parent Home and a Poor Childhood Shaped My View of Money
• My Life Story, Part 2: From a Million in Debt to Eight Figures

This is the final part of my three-part life story.

It isn't about investing techniques.

It's about this:

Once money is no longer a problem,

what do we really have to face?

My hunger for money was never greed — it was fear

There's one moment I remember very, very clearly.

A long time ago, I was chatting with my mom,

and I asked her, “What are you hoping for in a daughter-in-law?”

She answered with one sentence:

“Just someone who doesn't look down on us for being poor.”

In that instant, my heart sank.

I remember filling in family background forms in elementary school

that asked, “Which class does your family belong to?”

I always ticked middle class,

though I knew perfectly well we weren't.

That sense of scarcity around money

slowly grew into a deep insecurity inside me.

I used to tell myself, with total certainty:

I'm in this much pain

because I have no money,

because I'm poor.

A relationship that lit my obsession with getting rich

Early in my career, I had a girlfriend.

We'd been together less than six months and were still head over heels,

when she suddenly turned cold.

One day she said she wanted to go for a walk.

I happily agreed.

Knowing her health wasn't good,

I'd even gone to a Chinese herbal shop and brewed her a tonic.

When I handed it to her,

she said, very calmly:

“Let's break up.

Your income isn't enough to support me.”

In that moment,

beyond the sadness, what I felt most was anger.

Angry at myself for being poor,

angry at my own powerlessness.

That day,

I made a vow to myself:

I'm going to be rich.

I'm going to make lots and lots of money.

This will never happen to me again.

To be clear: I'm not against work or effort

Let me be clear about one thing first.

I've always believed

that women should have their own work after marriage too.

Because work isn't only about money;

it also brings:

• a sense of achievement
• value to society
• relationships

Work is one of the main ways we connect with the world.

I hope my future partner

does what she loves,

rather than living only for money.

Past a certain income, happiness starts to level off

Research has found:

once income passes US$70,000,

the link between happiness and income weakens markedly.

I can confirm this from my own experience.

The moment money made me happiest

wasn't the day my net worth passed NT$10 million.

It was the first time I saved NT$1 million.

That day I went to the bank,

withdrew a million in cash, and put it in front of me.

I stared at that stack of bills for a long time,

and only one thought came to mind:

Why is it so short?

I'd imagined a million would be tall and thick.

In reality it was about the height of a mug — roughly ten centimeters.

But that day, for the first time, I truly felt:

I really have money now.

But the interesting part came later.

When my net worth passed NT$10 million,

I was happy for just that one evening.

After that,

there were only numbers moving.

However much they grew,

they never brought real happiness again.

After reaching the summit, nothing changed

It's a lot like climbing a mountain.

Before you reach the top,

you keep imagining how beautiful the view will be.

But when you finally stand there,

you find that

the view is beautiful,

and that's it.

Once you've seen it,

you still have to climb back down.

Only then do you realize

that what really mattered

was the whole journey.

Did you notice the scenery along the way?

Did you enjoy the flowers, the insects, the birdsong?

The animated film Soul

is about exactly this.

Once a dream comes true,

does life change straight away?

No.

It quickly becomes just another part of your everyday.

The weakest part of my life was actually relationships

It was around this time

that I began to realize something:

the weakest part of my life

was relationships.

This has a lot to do with the family I grew up in.

A single-parent home, long separations and a lack of steady care

taught me early to “rely on myself.”

But it also left me

always feeling alone in relationships.

When I began to share, meaning slowly appeared

In the story of Into the Wild,

one line hit me hard:

“Happiness only real when shared.”

In that moment I understood:

joy really does become real only when you share it.

Through sharing, I began to feel that I was contributing something to the world.

It was a deep kind of satisfaction

that came from being needed.

When I create, I often slip into a state of flow

and keep going for three or four hours without stopping.

That feeling

is something money can't buy.

Later, the show started bringing in a little sponsorship income.

Honestly, very little —

next to my main job and investments, almost nothing.

But I treasure it.

Because I think:

if a middle-aged guy like me,

with only three hundred Instagram followers,

eight months into creating,

can land a sponsorship —

then maybe

doing what you love really can be a way to make a living?

Desire is a hole you can never fill

Later I read Never Enough: From Barista to Billionaire by Canadian entrepreneur Andrew Wilkinson.

After seeing everything the world of the wealthy had to offer, its author decided to give away most of his fortune.

I was deeply moved.

Because I know that feeling:

desire really has no finish line.

The Almanack of Naval Ravikant puts it bluntly:

“Desire is a contract you make with yourself

to be unhappy until you get what you want.”

And the harsher truth is that

once you get it, you quickly adapt again.

“But I'm still afraid of not having money”: an answer for the anxious

I know that by now,

some of you are thinking:

“Doug, you can say all this

because you're not short of money anymore.”

That's fine; I understand.

So here's a very practical answer.

If you invest NT$5,000 a month (about US$150):

• in a US total-market index ETF (such as VOO)
• assuming a 10% annualized return

after 30 years: about NT$10 million

after 40 years: about NT$27 million

If you invest in Taiwan's 0050 instead:

• about 8% a year
• after 40 years: about NT$16 million

This isn't fantasy;

it's math.

Once you know your future has a floor,

you really don't need to worry about money every day.

There's a film I love:

The Family Man.

The main character has every material success,

yet he's alone.

In a parallel life,

he lives an ordinary, noisy life — with someone waiting for him to come home.

When I watched it twenty years ago, I just found it heartwarming.

Watching it now, I was in tears.

If it were you,

which life would you choose?

We can't live our lives over,

but we can always choose

where we go from here.

Closing: happiness is hidden in who walks beside you

After all this, I finally understand one thing:

what truly holds up the weight of a life

was never how much you have,

but who is still beside you.

Someone willing to listen to you,

someone who didn't leave when you were low,

someone waiting for you to come home,

someone by your side, living out the days with you.

Those moments of eating together, talking, walking, fighting and making up

seem insignificant,

but when you look back,

they become the warmest part of your whole life.

I came to understand this late.

Only in my forties

did I truly realize:

relationships are the root of happiness.

I hope you don't have to

go the long way round like I did,

taking so many detours

before you look back and find this answer.

May you give your time to the people who matter a little sooner;

may you invest a little sooner in the relationships worth keeping for a lifetime.

Because in the end,

what walks with you to the finish line

is never achievements or numbers,

but the people who walked through life with you.

• Listen to the episode (in Mandarin): #33 Doug's life story, part 3: What happiness really is
• Further reading:
  My Life Story, Part 1
  My Life Story, Part 2